ONE startling fact is very apparent at the present time, that is, the rapid increase of skepticism. Some of the faithful are beginning to open their eyes to this sad truth, who, till recently, had supposed the world was really growing better, and that the millennium was about to begin, when nearly all would be converted; but they now see the very opposite is true, and these are truly times of great peril to the church of Christ. Says the Tract Journal for April, '63:—"The progress of skepticism in the English Established Church has been so great as to occasion serious alarm among the lovers of truth. A meeting has recently been held in London, of three hundred clergymen, to consider what should be done in this emergency. It was there stated by the most eminent divines that the infection prevails in the universities. Young men, both at Oxford and Cambridge, are 'becoming so unsettled in their minds that in many cases they shrink from the responsibility of taking orders in the church;' 'the more daring the skeptical statements broached in the Common Rooms the more favorably they are received.' The nature of this unbelief was summed up by the chairman of the meeting, Rev. Daniel Wilson, Vicar of Islington:— 'If I were asked to express in a single word the prevailing sentiment of those who indulge in this unrestrained spirit of free inquiry, I should describe it thus—that the Bible is behind the age; that it was well adapted to the childhood of the church, but that in the present advanced period of knowledge the final appeal must be withdrawn from the written Word and transferred to man's verifying faculty.' It is well known that the most elaborate attacks have of late been made upon the authenticity of the Scriptures. These are not of the gross and repulsive school of Voltaire and Paine, but they assume the more decent guise of learning, and a zeal for the truth. The late notorious work of Bishop Colenso is a specimen. In our own country there have been a few feeble imitators of these writers, one of the feeblest of whom is the Rev. L. A. Sawyer, author of a new translation of the New Testament and parts of the Old. He has published several articles denying the historical verity of the Pentateuch and claiming for the Hebrew books a comparatively modern date."